Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 109

When it comes to listening, whether to music or to discourse, the answer to the question: how many ears are involved? depends, of course, on the number of listeners; but one thing seems quite sure: it will be a multiple of two. Ears, in the act of listening, work by pairs. There seem to be no exceptions …

Fojan Gharibnejad’s -O- For Trained Female Vocal Cords, Face and Body (2019) centers its topic on women’s emancipation, self-discovery with a particular focus on masturbation and orgams. This approx. 25 minute-multimedia theater work for solo voice, three video projections and audience participation re-imagines Jacques Lacan’s theory of »mirror stage« as one for a woman who discovers her subjectivity through exploration of her body and emotions. This article offers a feministic interpretation of the work by a musical analysis using the concept of l’écriture féminine.

In Bruckner’s third-to-last motet, the Ecce sacerdos magnus of 1885, sections of great stylistic variety stand side by side, from monophonic chant to the pure diatonicism of a artifical ›cecilian‹ style to the third-related chords of late Romanticism. With this polystylism, Ecce sacerdos magnus takes to extremes a tendency that has characterized Bruckner’s sacred music since the 1860s, and for this reason Ecce sacerdos magnus lends itself to a pointed analytical discussion of Bruckner’s sacred music in its liturgical, social, and stylistic context.

The paper deals with the performance history of Gustav Mahler’s symphonic works in Japan before the Second World War and the cultural-political events connected with it. While Mahler’s symphonies had been a regular feature of concert programs in Japan in the 1920s, in the 1930s attempts to establish a »Japanese harmony« increasingly challenged the previously uncritically adopted music from Germany and Austria. Klaus Pringsheim, who was convinced of the universality of functional harmony, became an enemy of this movement and was dismissed from the Tokyo Music Academy in 1937. His commitment to Mahler in Japan was also criticized. A study of Japanese music journals, however, makes it clear that Mahler’s music did not disappear from the Japanese scene until the last year of the war, despite the intensification of German-Japanese alliance politics.

The essay discusses Nikolaus Matthes’ new composition of the lost St. Marc Passion by J.S. Bach. It argues that this kind of compositions in historical style should be understood as the compositional representation of a certain interpretation of Bach’s music: they transform contemporary performance practice into new works (I). The article sketches the history of the images of Bach’s music as an oscillation between theology and aesthetics: Bach as Thomaskantor or as Altklassiker (II). Matthes’ Markuspassion is argued to merge the two currents by opting, on the one side, for an opera-style composition full of thrilling effects, and, on the other hand, by representing Bach as sharing the baroque sensibility Walter Benjamin famously identified with the endless multiplication of allegories within the inescapable disaster of immanence (III).